Arts and business might seem poles apart, but Rachel Jones says that investment from the latter can be invaluable to the former.

Arts and business might seem poles apart, but Rachel Jones says that investment from the latter can be invaluable to the former. Kirstie McCrum speaks to the chief executive of Arts and Business Cymru

RACHEL Jones could have had a very different life. The softly-spoken chief executive of Arts and Business Cymru is all about administration now, but back in her teens, she was an avid musician and was on the road to a career playing professionally.

Today she heads up the charity which brokers links between the arts and businesses in Wales.

Her love for the arts started when, as a six-year-old in Neath, she began playing the viola.

“I was part of the West Glamorgan Youth Music scene right from the age of eight through to 21. By the time I was a teenager, I knew I wanted to go into music and was going to try to be a professional musician. I got a place to do a music degree in Goldsmith’s University in London,” she reveals.

Moving to London to do the degree was Jones’ dream, but just over a month after the course started, disaster struck.

“Five weeks into the course I got run over. I was very lucky, but I did crush and fracture a vertebrae in my back which meant while I could continue my degree and playing at an amateur level, I was advised that if I was going to try to be a professional musician then I would be riddled with arthritis in my back,” she says.

Jones’ dream of being a professional musician lay in tatters, but she completed her degree.

“Having my future changed like that was a real shock, but while I was in college I got roped in to being the secretary of the college orchestra and got hooked. Then I founded my own chamber orchestra at college and decided I wanted to go into arts administration,” she says.

After university Jones worked with the Van Walsum music agency in the orchestral tour department for a year and a half before moving home to Wales. For a while she had four jobs to make ends meet, but soon found she couldn’t sustain the hectic lifestyle.

“I went home to Neath and was barmaid in my friend’s pub. I got a part-time job in an organisation called Live Music Now, which I am still on the Wales committee of now. But because it was part time I had to supplement my income so I was also working in the box office of the New Theatre (in Cardiff) and doing data input for an organisation called Cardiff Arts Marketing.”

Feeling rundown, in 1996 at the age of 24, Jones applied for one job to replace the four – as administrator of what was then called ABSA Wales and South West England, the Association for Business Sponsorship of the Arts.

“I didn’t understand at that point what sponsorship was, and had no real desire to go into it, I just wanted to be in the arts and in particular in music.”

On Jones’ second day, the director handed in his notice, so when the acting director was away, she stepped up to an acting manager role and then a manager role.

“I was lucky that I had a brilliant advisory committee which was an incredible support. One of the committee members, Nicola Heywood Thomas, basically took over the running of ABSA Wales with me, unofficially, and when the director left we couldn’t find a new director.

“I was acting director for so long that by the time I was 27 they appointed me in the role, so it was a steep learning curve in three years.”

Now 39, Jones says she never would have imagined she would spend more than 10 years with Arts and Business Cymru, but she’s keen to point out that it’s still a position that invigorates her on a daily basis.

“It’s definitely my vocation. I didn’t know that when I started here, but I can’t imagine doing anything else now. It’s an organisation I hope goes on for a long time because I’m not going anywhere if it does,” she says.

Until 2008, Arts and Business Cymru was funded across the UK by the Arts Council of England, but in 2008 the Arts Council made cuts. Jones went to the Wales government for funding and secured it ensuring financial independence, which she says has allowed them to better serve the interests of Wales.

“We do two main things for the arts. The first is to help them diversify their income, so especially now when the public purse is getting tighter, we help put them in a position where they can get income from other sources, from the private sector. We train them in getting business partnerships and then how to manage those partnerships and develop them.

“We also broker partnerships between business and the arts. We’re very business-led with that. We go to businesses and they say, ‘these are the objectives we want to achieve through working with the arts’ and we find the right arts project for them,” she explains.

Arts and Business Cymru offers training to arts organisations which are often quite small to enable them to run more efficiently.

“We find in many arts organisations, they are working there because of a love of the arts and quite often they come to those jobs without formal training. In a smaller organisation, the senior person might be doing the HR, business planning and finance. So we access training for them free of charge to give them the business expertise and skills that they need.”

Looking ahead to 2012, she is thrilled about the projects Arts and Business Cymru are running.

“As well as retaining many of our successful programmes, in April 2011 I managed to relaunch Arts and Kids. It’s all about engaging children and young people who are socially disadvantaged in some way, and we’ve already managed to engage 800 since April. Every project has business sponsorship attached to it, so we have some fantastic partnerships planned for the coming year on Arts and Kids, and that’s an area which I really want to expand next year.

“We’re also about to bring out a new initiative called Young Professionals on Boards, which will put young up-and-coming business people on the boards of arts organisations, specifically concentrating on young people under 30, because you have to have that sort of fresh input onto arts boards.

“There’s only so much we can do at the moment because we’re such a small team, but we are increasing our income every year and growing every year so there’s all sorts of new ideas that we’d love to do.”

At work it’s arts and business, but at home she’s kept busy by her six-year-old son, Elis.

“At the moment, it’s all about tae kwon do for him, but he’s going to start learning the piano in January and then one of his godmothers has given him a little violin and so I’m going to start teaching him. I think it will be a lot of fun, and I do want to play again too. It is something I think about, that when my son gets a little bit older, I plan to rejoin the orchestra and start playing again, because I really do miss it. But I know I’m a lot happier than I would have been as a professional musician.”

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